Nishida's Philosophical Resistance
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NISHIDA’S PHILOSOPHICAL RESISTANCE TO THE SECULAR-RELIGION BINARY _______________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Student Board ________________________________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillments Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy ________________________________________________________________________ By Dennis Stromback August 2019 Examination Committee Members: Shigenori Nagatomo, Advisory Chair, Religion Department Rebecca Alpert, Religion Department Terry Rey, Religion Department Espen Hammer, External Member, Philosophy Department ii ABSTRACT It has been common in scholarship to frame Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy (西田哲学) as an attempt at overcoming the dualities of Western modernity. But what has been downplayed in this reading is how Nishida re-interprets the concept of religion in a way that challenges modernist theories of religion, with implications that speak to the problematics of the secular-religion binary today. Nishida’s view of religion, as an existential form of awareness, and a structuring logic of historical reality, with its own epistemological criteria, contrast with the theoretical accounts that assume religion is opposite to the real—or that religion is subordinate to the secular. By designating religion as a logical category that coincides with the real, Nishida’s philosophical standpoint offers a means to not only re-think the relationship between the secular and the religious, but to re-think the relationship between the West and the rest of the world, because if rationality is not a superior category over religion, then the races, cultures, and ethnicities that have been historically subordinated are placed on an equal epistemological footing with Western philosophy and science. In this sense, Nishida’s philosophy of religion allows us to think critically about the “problem of religion” and presents a discussion that can also be used to address some of the issues raised within post-colonial studies. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to all of those with whom I have had the pleasure to work during this project, as well as other related projects. Each of the members of my Dissertation Committee has provided me profound personal and professional guidance and taught me a great deal about scholarship and what the academic world means today. I would especially like to thank Dr. Shigenori Nagatomo, the chairman of my committee. As my sensei and mentor, he has taught me more than I could ever give him credit for here. Another important teacher and mentor is Rebecca Alpert, who has helped and supported me tremendously not just academically, but in my personal life. Finally, the completion of this project could not have been accomplished without the support of the following people: Terry Rey, Espen Hammer, Nozomi Adachi, Leah Kalmanson, Anthony Nadler, Jason Wirth, John Krummel, Kanako Yamana, Patrick Wyant, Ali Moyer, Adam Valerio, Joseph Rozansky, Kin Cheung, Teruyo Suzuki Grubman, Kishiko Mambo, Kim Donahoo, and of course, my parents. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………....ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………….….iii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….….……1 The Aim of a Historical Reading of Nishida…………………………….….…...10 The Body of the Argument……………………………………………….……...22 Nishida and the Problem of the Secular-Religion Binary……………….…….…27 2. THE SECULAR-RELIGION BINARY: THE POLITICS OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGION WITHIN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY……………………….……….30 History of the World-Religions Paradigm…………………………….…….…...31 The Theorization of Religion and the Antithesis of the Secular…………..……..44 Eurocentrism in the Secular-Religion Binary………………………………..…..63 Summary………………………………………………………………………....73 3. THE CONCEPT OF SHŪKYŌ IN JAPAN………………………………………..…76 The Invention and Debate of the Concept of Shūkyō…………………………....78 The Beginning of Japanese Philosophical Resistance…………...............87 The Revitalization of Asian Knowledge…………………………………94 Nishida’s Re-interpretation of the Category of Shūkyō………………….……..101 Summary…………………………………………………………………...…...114 4. NISHIDA’S EARLY INVERSION OF THE CATEGORY OF SHŪKYŌ………...118 v The Young Nishida on Shūkyō…………………………………………………119 Pure Experience and the Conception of the Good……………………...128 Nishida’s Criticisms of Western Conceptions of the Good………….....138 Intuition in Self-Awareness…………………………………………………….142 Summary………………………………………………………………………..148 5. NISHIDA’S MIDDLE YEARS: THE SEARCH FOR THE LOGICAL FOUNDATION OF THE HISTORICAL WORLD……………………………………151 The Unity of Beauty, Morality, and Religion…………………………………..154 Activities as Forms of Historical Expression…………………………………...162 The Concept of Basho…………………………………………………………..167 The Unresolvable Issue within Consciousness…………………………………179 The Logic of Existence: Nishida’s World of Intelligibility…………………….181 Self-Contradiction in Epistemology……………………………………………185 The Place of Action-Intuition in Historical Reality…………………………….191 The Logic of Historical Life……………………………………………………194 Summary………………………………………………………………………..203 6. NISHIDA’S LATER YEARS: THE LOGIC OF SHŪKYŌ………………………...205 Nishida’s Concept of Humanity………………………………………………...206 The Self-Contradiction of Historical Reality…………………………………...212 The Dialectics of Nishida and Hegel……………………………………….......215 Nishida’s Last Major Writing…………………………………………………..222 Nishida’s View of the Secular………………………………………….230 Nishida’s Global World………………………………………………...236 vi Summary………………………………………………………………………..248 7. CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS OF THE SECULAR-RELIGION BINARY IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES………………………………………………………………...250 The Secularization of Religion Today………………………………………….251 Concluding Thoughts…………………………………………………………...263 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………268 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Richard King, in the essay “The Copernican Turn in the Study of Religion” (2017), argues that one of the gravest problems with naturalistic accounts of religion is that they lack non-Western voices, except as “objects of study,” in the attempt to understand religion as a theoretical object. This is hardly surprising, because the “problem of religion” did not emerge until early modern Europe. King then adds that “we do not find any ‘theorists of religion’ in ‘foreign lands’ precisely because ‘religion’ was neither a category nor an operating assumption in the intellectual and cultural traditions of non-European civilizations.”1 King then goes on to say that “this realization, however, should cause us to reflect upon our own operating assumptions and the implications of their universalization through the language game of ‘religion.’”2 While it is debated among post-colonial scholars as to whether or not the category of “religion” has been indigenous to non-European places and regions, one can find within the Japanese context though that the concept of “religion” (shūkyō 宗教) emerged as a proper category in Japan around the 1850s. Following its lexicalization, the concept of religion became an object of theoretical and philosophical debate, particularly around the question as to 1 Richard King, “The Copernican Turn in the Study of Religion,” in Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Methodologies, ed. Richard King (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2017), 7-8. 2 Ibid., 9. 2 whether Japan had religion or not and/or what kind of group or collectivity in Japan would constitute this phenomenon.3 This is only half of the story. King’s argument that a theoretical object called “religion” never emerged in non-European cultures is not entirely correct, though. As I will argue in this dissertation, in addition to the fact that the concept of religion was not native to Japan, it also became a source for critical reflection among many intellectuals in the Meiji (明治時代, 1868-1912), Taishō (大正時代, 1912-1926), and Shōwa (昭和時 代, 1926-1989) periods, and in particular for Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎, 1870-1945), the father of the Kyoto School (京都学派), toward positioning many aspects of Japanese thought against predominant dualistic epistemologies and ontologies of Western philosophy. Nishida would also redefine the category of religion in a way that expands its explanatory power, such that it advances an imagining of an alternative modernity, a modernity that is opposed to many of the epistemological and ontological claims that structured the development of Western modernity—the worldview(s) established in Europe in the 17th century that introduced and legitimized the paradigms of rationality and scientific inquiry. Although Nishida’s philosophy changed considerably throughout his life, one can still find that Nishida’s view of modernity does originate from a stance that was largely shaped by Japanese intellectual heritages, in particular the logics of Buddhism. But Nishida did not just draw on Buddhist logic: Nishida was indeed trained in Western philosophy, even describing his work as being largely Hegelian. However, as 3 See Jason Ānanda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 3 John Krummel reminds us, one should be careful not to think of Nishida’s philosophy as a mere synthetic combination of Hegel and Zen, because Nishida provides a standpoint that surpasses the purview of both of thinkers’ worldviews.4 But, as I will show in this dissertation, Nishida develops a logic of religion that seeks to challenge, explicitly and implicitly, rationalism, scientism, materialism, and other theoretical